Let’s imagine a brand that offers a product of average, and more often poor, quality. Interacting with it is disappointing in most cases, but the brand constantly demands your attention and money. And you pay voluntarily and gladly.
People fall in love with these brands in childhood, stay loyal to them for life, and even introduce their children to them. And once a week, no other brands exist for the user except this one.
What are we talking about? Football clubs. It is to them that a person becomes attached in childhood, and practically never changes their preferences for the rest of their life. It is hard to imagine companies from other industries that, given such initial conditions, would not lose their audience within literally a few weeks.
What This Project Is About
LOSICH.CO is a blog about brand management, PR and communications, but we will explore these issues through the example of the football industry.
Football is very similar to a classic business, with its own companies (football clubs), competition (tournaments), regulators (federations), consumers (the audience), money and, of course, communications between everyone and everyone else.
Unlike other areas of business, football operates by somewhat different rules: profit here is not the only and often not the main metric of success, there are no guaranteed or predictable results, and investments are more often not recouped than recouped. On the other hand, in football, emotions, philosophy, values and loyalty matter enormously — all the things that businesses often talk about in their brand books and on the “About us” page of their website, but don’t know how to use in real life. Learning to use these things is what we will be doing.
Who This Blog Is For:
Entrepreneurs and founders. Brand values, mission and philosophy in football are the foundation of many clubs’ existence. For example, the Spanish football club Athletic from Bilbao only signs Basque players or those connected to the region. And this is what its audience values, what it is willing to pay for and why it stays loyal to the club.
Brand strategists. We will examine how football brands are built, their short-term and long-term strategies, and learn to extract value from this information for ourselves.
Brand managers, marketers and PR specialists. We will look at how clubs position themselves, find niches, what events they hold, and how they handle criticism and crises. Much of this may come in handy in your daily work.
Those who work in the sports industry. Clubs, leagues, agencies and sponsors will benefit from an outside perspective from brand management, without the usual “all that matters is that the team wins.”
Everyone who loves football and wants to understand it more deeply. It will be interesting even if marketing is not your profession.
